Interview with Ambrotos Press author John Everson.
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How did you get into writing horror?

I’ve always written – poems, song lyrics, short fiction… but while I grew up reading truckloads of science fiction, most of my ideas for short story ideas have always seemed to stem from the realm of the macabre. I don’t feel believable when I write an alien character (though I love to read them) but I feel much more comfortable writing from the point of view of a demon or most recently, a Siren. And I love stories that have a good twist at the end… so that’s the sort of thing I try to write.

What would you say is the overall tone of your horror fiction? Is it more like the hack-and-slash variety, or the psychological mind-rending?

My fiction has always had strong elements of erotic horror. I’m not generally a “serial killer” style hack and slash writer, but certainly my novels have all had strong elements of sex and violence. The difference from the “slasher” gore for me is that my violence tends to stem from sacrificial acts initiated to provoke magic or demons or some element of the supernatural. I don’t write about the “serial killer around the corner.”

Do you approach horror short fiction any different than your novels?

Not really. I approach a story as a story. Some stories by their nature need to be told fast and short, others need to stretch out and show a variety of characters and narrative skeins. The arc and complexity of the story arc defines the word count. I just put them down on paper. They tell me what they are and when they’re done.

What scared you most as a child and do you ever incorporate similar frights in your fiction today?

My dad used to tell me there was a lion in our crawlspace when I was a little kid, in order to keep me out of the crawl, where there was a sump pump hole I could fall into, as well as some storage things that my parents didn't want me getting into. So, I became terrified of being near the utility room where the crawlspace was. Any time I had to go in there, I'd stare into the darkness of the crawl, my heart would start beating fast, and I'd get the hell out of there as fast as I could! Later, when I got a little older and did go into the crawl, I always felt like something was behind me. I tried so hard when I was 10 or 11 to make it my “clubhouse,” but I had the creeps every time I was down there, so that never worked.

My big fears now still probably relate to that "fear of what's in the dark." I also, like most middle-aged folk, fear the loss of the security that I've spent years building up. Not quite as visceral as the fear of a toothy monster in the dark, but just as stomach-ice-inducing. And I’ve certainly dealt with that theme in novels like Covenant and Siren.

What would readers say is your best book, and why?

Readers are all over the map on that. I’ve got readers who have reviewed The 13^th, probably my most over-the-top book, who give it five stars and rave about the pacing, fright factor, blood and nudity… and then there are others who have given it one star and say that it’s shallow and silly.

Then I’ve got some readers who call Covenant, my first novel, my best book because of its slower buildup and character development and eerie overall mood. But another contingent loves the sequel, Sacrifice better, because it really has a very different attack – it moves much faster and visits many places, as opposed to Covenant which has a far more claustrophobic feel as nobody ever leaves the small town where the horror is taking place. I had one fan who called Sacrifice her favorite book of all time! And finally, there’s Siren, which to me is the most personal novel of the four, since it very much deals with older life themes of loss and love (and lust). And many people have said they think that’s my best work so far. I suppose the fact that people all seem to pick different books is good – maybe it means I didn’t write one decent book and three that just suck!

Please tell us a little bit about your forthcoming title for Ambrotos Press?

I can’t tell you a whole lot about it, because I’m still actually writing The Haunted House By The Cemetery. But obviously the title is a nod at one of Lucio Fulci’s best films, House by the Cemetery, because I love his films and so many other independent horror films of the ‘70s and early ‘80s. The novelette takes its setting (loosely) from Bachelor’s Grove, an old abandoned cemetery in the midst of a forest preserve set off from the road by a small gravel path and bordered by a small pond. It’s a quiet, eerie, creepy kind of place, and there are dozens of tales about ghosts and hauntings attached to that spot. It usually appears in articles and books at the top of the “Most Haunted Places in Illinois”. I grew up not too far from there and heard all sorts of ghost stories about it when I was in Cub Scouts. As an adult, my first house was literally just a mile down the road from Bachelor’s Grove. So that setting is something that I wanted to play with.

Where can readers learn more about you and your work?

Well, the best place is my website, www.johneverson.com. I host my blog on my site (it’s not an external blog as so many are), import my Twitter feed and have a monthly e-newsletter signup there. In addition the site has information on all my books, including excerpts of reviews and a page with links to where you can buy e-book versions of all my work as well. And it contains archives of some of the newspaper and magazine reviews I’ve written, samples of the book cover and website artwork that I’ve created and music that I’ve recorded. I’m also on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

Interview with Wrath James White, in regards to titles for Ambrotos Press, the forthcoming Dark Quest Books Horror Imprint.

 How did you get into writing horror?

My mother was a big fan of horror. I was only five-years-old when I watched Jaws with my mom and my sister at the drive-in theater. We used to watch Creature Double Feature and Doctor Shock together, lying at the foot of my mother’s bed on Saturday afternoons. They would play all the old Hammer films. Those are some of my fondest memories.

I was 8 or 9 when I read my first horror novel. It was Andrew Neiderman’s novel Pin about a pair of siblings with an anatomy doll as an imaginary friend. Then, when I was 10, I read The Amityville Horror and The Entity. I wrote my first horror story in junior high school, around 1982. I was 12. I wrote nothing but horror and thrillers after that but I didn’t get serious about it until around 1999. That’s when I joined the HWA and started submitting my work.

 What would you say is the overall tone of your horror fiction? Is it more like the hack-and-slash variety, or the psychological mind-rending?

My work is both the visceral “Hack and Slash” and the mindfuck. I really think that in books like His Pain, The Resurrectionist, and Population Zero, the ideas behind the tales, the concepts, were just as scary as the execution of them. The outline was scary before I wrote a single word.

That’s what I always try to come up with, ideas that are scary on paper. A child that feels nothing but pain grows into an adult and learns to convert pain into pleasure. A serial killer with the ability to bring his victims back from the dead with no memory of their deaths and murder them again and again and again. An environmental activist who values the planet more than individual human lives decides to start reducing the population one person at a time. And in my latest novel, Pure Hate, a guy who slept with his bestfriend’s girlfriend back in high school gets a knock on his door in the middle of the night 15 years later. It’s his old friend, who is now a prolific serial killer, and he still holds a grudge about what happened back in high school. These ideas are scary even before you read the story, even before you get to the graphic descriptions of violence and sexual perversions.

 Do you approach horror short fiction any different than your novels?

The only difference is that I don’t outline my short stories. Other than that, I pace them almost the same. That’s why my novels are so fast-paced. I want them to read like short stories. There’s no fluff. I give the background story in the middle of the action so the reader never feels bored or like they’re receiving an information dump.

 What scared you most as a child and do you ever incorporate similar frights in your fiction today?

I saw the movie, The Howling when I was 12 or 13. That was probably the scariest thing I’d ever seen at that time in my life. Perhaps that’s why being eaten alive is a recurring thing in my work. It’s one of the most horrible things I could imagine. John Carpenter’s The Thing scared the hell out of me as well. I watched that with my girlfriend when I was 15 and had to pretend that I wasn’t scared in order to look cool but I could literally feel my skin crawling during some scenes. That movie is still a masterpiece in my opinion.

There was a scene in Stephen king’s novel, Salem’s Lot when the boy is floating outside his friend’s window that freaked me out. And Robert McCammon’s masterpiece, Swan Song, creeped me out. I have a thing about skin disease and there were descriptions of growths so thick that they looked like a mask several of the character’s faces. My skin is crawling right now just thinking about it. I haven’t been brave enough to deal with that fear yet. If I did, critics would say I was just being gross for the sake of being gross rather than tackling a legitimate fear. Maybe I’ll do it in a short story someday.

 What would readers say is your best book, and why?

That’s a hard one. The Resurrectionist received the most praise because it was such an original idea and it was so widely read, being a mass-market novel. I think people were sort of tired of reading the same type of horror stories so it almost shocked them to read something so different.

 Book Reviewers really liked Yaccub’s Curse because of the poetic language and the realistic descriptions of urban life. It was probably my most character-driven novel and pulled a lot from my life growing up in Philadelphia. Pure Hate has a lot of the same elements that made Yaccub’s Curse so popular with critics. It also contains a lot of autobiographical elements.

 Please tell us a little bit about your forthcoming title for Ambrotos Press?

As I mentioned briefly earlier, Pure Hate is about a man named Malcolm Davis who is obsessed with the bestfriend who betrayed him in high school. 15 years later, Malcolm tracks down his former friend, Reed Baltimore, who is now a moderately successful midlist science fiction novelist. Malcolm’s life has taken a completely different path, however.

In the decade and a half since their friendship ended, Malcolm has become one of the worst serial killers in Philadelphia history and he blames his former friend for the transformation his life has undergone. When he knocks on Reed’s door late one night, he begins a murderous rampage that wreaks havoc on Reed’s life and everyone who tries to intervene, including the police detectives assigned to stop him. 

 Where can readers learn more about you and your work?

I maintain a blog at wordsofwrath.blogspot.com. They can also friend me on facebook or follow me on Twitter. I update Facebook and Twitter every day so you can always find out what I’ve got coming out, what readings or conventions I’m going to, at, or coming from. You can even find out what movies I watched and what I thought of them. I frequently ask for suggestions on what to watch so feel free to suggest one you think I might like.

Interview with Michael West, in regards to titles for Ambrotos Press, the forthcoming Dark Quest Books Horror Imprint.

How did you get into writing horror?

I don't think I ever really made a conscious decision. I’ve always been a storyteller, and I’ve loved Horror as long as I can remember.  I used to trick babysitters into letting me stay up late to watch Night Gallery episodes and Hammer films.  I’d collect toys based on the classic Universal monsters.  In the eighties, when a new horror film opened, I was always first in line.  Even when I wrote scripts for Educational Television, I found ways to sneak in horror themes.  I pitched a program called Teen Terrors—a look at the stress, fears, and anxieties that all teenagers must face—and filmed host segments in graveyards and the torture chambers of local haunted houses. It was only natural that, when I finally put pen to paper to write prose, the result would be horrific.

What would you say is the overall tone of your horror fiction? Is it more like the hack-and-slash variety, or the psychological mind-rending?

I aim for the psychologically disturbing or just plain creepy, but I’m not afraid to hack and slash. My work tends to be very atmospheric, visual as well as visceral. Perhaps it is my film and television background, but the story plays out as a movie in my head, and I want the reader to feel like they’re experiencing that same film as much as possible.

Do you approach horror short fiction any different than your novels?

They’re entirely different skill sets. In a short story, you have to develop a character and then get your point across very quickly. In a novel, you have more time to explore a situation and find out just what makes your characters tick.   In both cases, however, I have to have an ending in mind. Now, that ending may change a half dozen times by the time I get there, but I have to have that goal to work toward.

What scared you most as a child and do you ever incorporate similar frights in your fiction today?

As a child, it was the dark, the unknown, and the thought of being eaten alive by monsters both real and imagined.   Now, as an adult, the major fear I have is that something horrible will happen to someone I love. As an author, I draw from those early, childish fears and ground them in reality by merging them with my adult fear. And I think that’s what readers empathize with. As much as you might fear getting trapped in the dark, facing the unknown, or being devoured, how much more frightening would it be to picture your wife or child in that same situation?

What would readers say is your best book, and why?

The Wide Game (http://www.bymichaelwest.com/the-wide-game-2011). Readers really develop a connection to those characters; they feel like they know them, which makes what happens in the novel all the more terrifying. I don't care what genre you're working in, if the reader isn't emotionally invested in the people in your story, they're not going to read it. In my opinion, that's why a lot of movies made from horror novels fail. The filmmakers concentrate on the "Big Bad" alien, demon, what-have-you, and the characters get short shrift. When you really care about the people in a story, you get lost in the narrative and you feel things on a very visceral level. That's the type of connection I strive for in my own writing.

Please tell us a little bit about your forthcoming title for Ambrotos Press?

Vampires Don’t Sparkle! is for all those horror fans who have lamented that “Twilight ruined vampires

Where can readers learn more about you and your work?

Readers can find out more about me and my various projects via my website, by Michael West.com (http://www.bymichaelwest.com) , or by “liking” me on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Michael-West/140201419360946) and following me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/bymichaelwest). 

An Interview with Ty Schwamberger, horror author and acquisitions editor of Ambrotos Press , the forthcoming Dark Quest Books Horror imprint.

How did you get into writing horror?

Believe it or not, I actually didn’t start reading/writing horror until early 2008. The first two novels I read were Offspring by Jack Ketchum and Cuts by Richard Laymon. I loved them both, but after reading Laymon something happened deep inside me and shortly after I started writing my first novel, that ended up being published in late 2008 (this particular title has since went out of print). I always loved watching horror movies, though. In fact, it was Friday the 13^th and similar movies, that got me to love the genre in the first place.

What would you say was the overall tone of your horror fiction? Is it more like the hack-and-slash variety, or the psychological mind-rending? Tell us about some of your titles.

My stories, whether longer or short stories, tend to be character driven. I really dig writing twist endings. Overall, though, while my stories do have an element of gore, I would probably classify them as creepy, with an element of leaving the reader thinking, ‘holy crap’, more than anything. I not only enjoy writing about classic themes in the horror genre, but creating new and unique stories where my readers can identify with my voice on the page. It is totally by conscience, but I’ve been told several times that ‘my voice’ reminds people of Richard Laymon – which is totally an honor for me to hear.

I have a total of 7 books that are coming out in 2010. Half of these I’m Editor on, while the other half is my own work. While I’m excited about each and every one of them, there are two that really get my heart pounding – Relics & Remains, which I’m Editor on (which just so happens to be the first release by Ambrotos Press), containing stories by some of today’s most well-known authors and up-and-comers in the horror genre today and The Fields, a zombie novella that is coming out in March 2011, containing a special introduction by NY Times Bestselling Author, Jonathan Maberry.  

Do you approach horror short fiction any different than your novels?

I think you have to. A short story is a sprint, while writing a novel-length manuscript is a marathon. For me, at least, I enjoy writing novellas (25-30k words) the most. They’re short enough that you can keep the action flowing (if it’s interregnal to the story) , while building characters and fleshing out the plot to make it entertaining for the reader. So, while I did complete a novel-length manuscript in 2010, the majority of releases with my own writing coming out during the next two years will be novellas.

Who would you say is your anti-influence in the horror genre? What do you strive not to be in your writing?

If I answered this question honestly, half the people would want to burn me at the stake, while the other half would cheer. So, I think I’ll pass answering this one. J

You have a number of upcoming horror anthologies that you have edited, can you tell us something of the challenge in incorporating all of those different voices into one collection?

I had two anthologies where I was Editor come out in 2010. Both of which were by Open Submission. I then began working for Neal Levin at Dark Quest Books and he gave me the freedom to switch gears and make the anthologies by Invite Only. Let me say, while I learned a lot doing the Open Submission anthologies, I much prefer going the Invite Only route. This way, I have more control, because I’ve read everyone’s work in the past, to mesh their distinct voices together into one collection. The authors that are in the upcoming, Fell Beasts and Relics & Remains anthologies, have been wonderful to work with and I thank each and every one of them for contributing.

What scared you most as a child and do you ever incorporate similar frights in your fiction today?

I’m the type of person that doesn’t jump or even have their heart quicken when walking through a haunted house or while watching a scary movie. I don’t know if that makes me sick in the head or not, but I really just have a deep love for the genre itself. So, unfortunately, I don’t have any juicy bits to tell people about that scared me as a child.

What would readers say is your best book, and why?

It will be the previously mentioned zombie novella, The Fields, coming in February 2011. This is a very different take on a classic theme, monster, which I think readers will really dig. 

Have you ever been approached to have your work turned into a movie?

There was a short film, Cake Batter, released in early 2010. It was actually based on my short story by the same title that is contained in my short story collection, For After Midnight, which will be released by Dark Quest Books in February 2011.

I’m also currently in talks with an independent and a large production company for a few other titles, as well. Of course, mum’s the word on this for now.

What do you have coming up in the future as an author?

For After Midnight, short story collection, Dark Quest Books, February 2011

‘Last Night Out’, a novella in the 3-novella collection, Twisted Tales from the Torchlight Inn, Wicked East Press, February 2011

The Fields, a novella being published by The Zombie Feed, an Imprint of Apex Publications, February 2011.

Taxi Ride, a novella being published by Severed Press, 3Q 2011.

On Dark, Lonely Nights, short story collection, Wicked East Press, 1Q 2012.

Dinin’, a novella being published by Bad Moon Books, 1Q 2012.

The above list excludes books where I’m the Editor during the next two years. There are also a few books that have been accepted, but I can’t announce quite yet.

And what is coming up for Ambrotos Press?

2011

 1st Quarter (anthology)

Relics & Remains, Edited by Ty Schwamberger

Featuring Stories by:  John Everson, Adam P. Lewis, Tim Deal, Deborah LeBlanc, Steven Shrewsbury, Thomas A. Erb, Dean Harrison, Sheldon Higdon, Maurice Broaddus, Wrath James White, Mike Oliveri, Dora Machado, Michael Laimo and Jeff Strand.

 2nd Quarter (anthology)

Death, Be Not Proud, Edited by Thomas A. Erb

 3rd Quarter (novel)

Pure Hate by Wrath James White

 4th Quarter (anthology)

Twisted Tales - An Anthology, Edited by Ty Schwamberger, Dean Harrison & Thomas A. Erb.

  2012

 1st Quarter (anthology)

Vampires Don't Sparkle!, Edited by Michael West

 2nd Quarter (novella)

The Haunted House by the Cemetery by John Everson

 3rd Quarter (novella)

Deadlands by Gord Rollo

 4th Quater (anthology)

Untitled, Edited by TBA

You have a very curious slogan for a horror-themed imprint, can you tell us what that is and something about how it developed?

“A New Day. A New Beginning.”

Well, Ambrotos is the Greek word for Immortal. I wanted to come up with a slogan/tagline that refers to the beginning of something unique and says, “we’re ready to make a distinct mark within the small presses in the horror genre.” I think with the lineup Ambrotos Press has, we have a hell of a shot.

HOWELL, NJ - Neal Levin and Ty Schwamberger of Dark Quest Books are proud to present Ambrotos Press, the publisher’s brand-new imprint dedicated to horror fiction. Its mission: to publish only the highest quality fiction in the genre. Look for titles released under this imprint beginning March 2011.

 "The Ambrotos imprint will be for Horror fiction what the Pixar brand is to animated films.” Says author Michael West (Skull Full of Kisses and The Wide Game),  “ Readers will know that every release will be the best the genre has to offer.”

Working in close conjunction with the publisher on this invitation-only imprint, Acquisition Editor Ty Schwamberger will selectively build the title list with some of the most well-known names in the genre, as well as promising up-and-comers. Initially it is planned that the imprint will release four titles a year in both print and ebook format.

 Upcoming titles include:

• Relics and Remains, which features stories by John Everson, Adam P. Lewis, Tim Deal, Deborah LeBlanc, Steven Shrewsbury, Thomas A. Erb, Dean Harrison, Sheldon Higdon, Maurice Broaddus, Wrath James White, Mike Oliveri, Dora Machado, Michael Laimo and Jeff Strand.
• Deadlands by Gord Rollo
• The Haunted House by the Cemetery by John Everson
• Vampires Don't Sparkle!, Edited by Michael West
• Twisted Tales - An Anthology, Edited by Ty Schwamberger, Dean Harrison & Thomas A. Erb.
• Pure Hate by Wrath James White
• Death, Be Not Proud, Edited by Thomas A. Erb

 For interviews please email the editor at: ty_schwamberger@yahoo.com.